Portable capture devices, such as hand held document scanners or digital cameras, have proven to be very useful tools in certain situations. Their portability and ease in capturing and saving information from various locations away from a user's office or work place are the primary benefits of such capture devices.
Though such portable capture devices are small, reducing their size to be even smaller and more portable is desirable. However, further reductions in size are fairly limited by the current physical user interface requirements. Most portable hand held document scanners, for example, have anywhere from ten to fifteen user input buttons to allow the user to control a number of different operations. Such operations include: start and stop scanning; save and delete scanned information; send scanned information; and view, zoom, and pan scanned data on the scanner display. The buttons must be large enough and adequately spaced to allow a user to easily control and press the buttons. The buttons must also be placed in such a fashion that the portable scanner device can be handled by the user without pressing buttons to activate various functions not intended to be activated in the normal transport and handling of the capture device, and while using the portable scanner device to scan a document. Buttons sometimes must be used in combination, making the scanner device somewhat awkward to use. Due to the physical space occupied by the user input buttons, the output display on such capture devices is often quite small by necessity, making use of the display less functional than desired. The same can be said for portable digital cameras.
It is thus apparent that there is a need in the art for an improved method or apparatus which will reduce the number of user input buttons required to operate the portable capture device and at the same time reduce the complexity of the user interface. There is also a need in the art to further reduce the size of portable capture devices to further increase their portability and ease of use. A further need in the art is to utilize a larger, more readable display in portable capture devices while maintaining a reduced overall size for the portable capture device. The present invention meets these and other needs in the art.